Alternative for Germany (AFD) co-founder Alexander Gauland says his compatriots should be proud of what their soldiers achieved during both World Wars, and the country should stop apologizing for its Nazi past.

The 76-year-old politician made the remarks during a speech to party members in Thuringia on September 2.

“If the French are rightly proud of their emperor and the Britons of Nelson and Churchill, we have the right to be proud of the achievements of the German soldiers in two world wars,” said Gauland.
The AfD is no stranger to controversy. In January senior party leader Bjoern Hoecke criticized the well-known Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, branding it a “monument of the shame in the heart of the capital.”

The AfD won 13% of the vote and came a stunning third place behind the main center-right and center-left parties in the recent election.
It polled particularly strongly in the former East Germany, which includes Berlin, attracting 21.5% of the vote, according to exit polling conducted by Infratest Dimap. In the West, it scored about 11%, the projections said. The results put the AfD on course to become the second largest party in the east, after the CDU.

Talks about the seating plan for the new German parliament have ended in deadlock with only one matter agreed. All parties want the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) should sit on the far right of the chamber, which ironically, that sparked concerns about their proximity to the government benches.

“We could live with that. That is similar to the regional parliaments. We will be sitting next to the government bench, that’s very nice,” Bernd Baumann, from the AfD’s parliamentary executive board, said.

The AfD passed the five percent threshold for the first time to secure themselves almost 100 seats in the Bundestag in Berlin.